Now she has been spotted looking after a coffee shop in Dublin, Ireland, according to a News Corp report.

Investigators in Ireland claim that someone with a very similar name to her father is director of the cafe where Ms Smith is said to be working.

The last reports of her whereabouts were back in 2011, when it was believed she may have been holed up in an inner-west suburb of Sydney after strange signs with her name scrawled on them emerged.

Ms Smith fled Thailand 18 years ago, having become the first foreigner to be given bail on serious drug charges, after her millionaire father, Terry Smith, had paid around $55,000 to secure her temporary freedom to await future court appearances.

It had been claimed by police that she was carrying opium when she was first arrested as she tried to fly out of Bangkok - a charge that can result in the death penalty - but that was reduced to 4kg of hashish and 500 amphetamine tablets after her parents arrived in the country with a top lawyer.

Ms Smith told police she had been paid to take a backpack to Tokyo for a Pakistani man named 'Hassan', and she was set up as a distraction from a larger smuggling operation.

She spent six months in Lard Yao Prison - nicknamed the Bangkok Hilton - before being granted bail and fleeing the country.

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When she fled from Bangkok in August 1996, the-then 20-year-old daughter of a wealthy Hong Kong-based insurance company executive, is believed to have used a British replacement passport - she claimed to have lost the first in the weeks before her arrest - to flee to Greece.

There, she obtained yet another British passport and vanished - ending up among the top 10 on Interpol's 'Most Wanted' list.

An international police search, involving crack investigators in Britain and Australia, failed to find any clues as to Miss Smith's whereabouts and her father, who had posted bail for her in Thailand, insisted he had no idea where she was.

The woman, who was 20 years old at the time of her imprisonment, was allegedly residing in an inner-west suburb of Sydney in 2011

Then in 2011 small, fascinating signs written on pieces of plaster and wood, popped up around the inner-west suburbs of Sydney suggesting that Miss Smith was living in the area - and may have even scrawled one of them herself.

Written on a small block of white-painted wood, it has been screwed into the tree and the following words written on it in black paint: 'Lisa Marie Smith. I did it for you, Damien. Look at me. Omen.'

Just two days earlier another small sign was discovered, written on a piece of plaster that had been painted red, and stuck on the side of a house. It read: 'Lisa Marie Smith. Bangkok Hilton Fugitive 1996'.

Around this time British police believed she may have changed her name to an Irish surname, and signs that emerged in the Sydney suburbs of Newtown at the time also reflect this.

One of them read: 'New Identity - McGuigan? Travels Eire 2 Australia as Though Invisible.'